Maybe I can win the lottery

Well, it's been a while since I've blogged. I've been busy and I'm afraid I just don't have the blogging routine down yet. So what shall we talk about today?

Let's talk about Car Dealers. For the past few months I've taken a contract to be a creative director for an agency that only has car dealer accounts. Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure someone out there is actually working as a creative for a car dealer that actually wants to have decent concept and execution. I'm praying that one of them will read this blog and contact me, because I've got some great ideas sitting here.

It starts out real nice, with me suggesting really clever ideas for radio, t.v., internet, community involvement, print, onsite, public relations, etc. They love the ideas and ask me to "hash them out".

In private, the car dealers talk about their country club memberships and putting in $20,000 sauna master baths in their winter homes.

They put you off. They make you wait for an hour for your confimred appointment with them, while they hunt down basketball playoff tickets for some fleet buyer and in the end they don't want to pay you anything.

Apparently in their world, it's okay for them to make tons of money, it's just not ok for anyone else they do business with to make a nickel.

There isn't a single bill that they won't discuss, debate and pay late. And when it's all said and done, they want you to put together a crew to go out and shoot the owner of the dealership looking like a wooden cigar-store-figure, while they rewrite your commercial to include their nephew Jimmy wearing a duck hunters outfit to the dulcent tones of some program director yelling "we're shooting down high prices".

The 60 seconds of radio copy need to carry every piece of information on every car they have and mention their name, phone number, street adress and web site 26 times each.

Where did I go wrong? I thought that if I offered some really good high concept creative and cutting edge production for bargain basement prices, it might make sense. As if selling one dealership (no matter what the car) is an easy task. It's about 100 times easier to sell a Jaguar or Toyota or Mercedes than it is to sell the dealership.

And the more time I spent with the dealers, the more I realized how I wouldn't buy a car from any of them. Somehow if you can manage to alienate your creative director to that level, I wonder what all of the car buying saps are supposed to think.

So, I now realize that while I pulled every trick I could possibly pull out of my magic bag and gave it every ounce of my soul, it just wasn't worth it.

I'm not sure who the original soul was that said "If you're doing local car, it merans you're just starting out or at the end of your advertising career." I'm starting to get the sense that they were right.

So please, would some ad agency or car dealership with a set of huevos in their pants please get a hold of me to restore my faith, before I go get a job making ads for our local public transit authority.

I have the concept already "The bus may be slow, but at least you don't have to visit a car dealer".